"No. No way. She wouldn't do that to me." Sensing this wasn't enough for Earl, he added, "She's the one who practically made me take a blood oath not to tell, remember?"
"That would be consistent with someone who didn't want you to think she was the leak."
"No," he said more forcefully, "she wouldn't do that." Would she?
"Listen, we'll worry about 'who' later. Just hang up and call Claire. Do you think you can?"
"Yeah, okay, I'll try," he said, talking himself through it. "I think she's teaching a class now."
"That won't stop someone who really wants to talk to her." And he knew Earl meant the reporter, not Jack. "They have their ways."
He dialed Claire's number and waited impatiently through each ring. Everything seemed to be in slow motion, yet he still didn't have the time he needed to think.
"Hold on, Jack, she's in her office now," the receptionist said. He looked at his watch again, certain that she was supposed to be in class.
"Hello?" Her voice was hesitant, cautious.
"Claire, it's me."
"Jack." She seemed relieved to hear from him, and he thought this was a good sign.
"Listen, don't take any more phone calls and don't talk to any reporters if they show up at the school. They might be trying to reach you about Jenny's case."
She was quiet, and he thought this was a bad sign. "They already called," she said finally. "He pretended to be someone calling with a message from you, so they pulled me out of class."
"Oh God, the asshole." The line fell silent, and he heard her take a deep breath.
"Is it true?"
Giving him a chance. Willing to trust him still, willing to believe whatever he said. If he'd had two options before, if he was going to lie to her, he lost the opportunity in the instant he hesitated. The ice broke and he fell in.
His hands gripped the steering wheel; he tried to stay focused on the highway. Ten minutes to the university if there was no traffic, another five from his car to her office. How do you contain a bomb that has already exploded? His car was not capable of going as fast as he wanted it to go. It was December, and he was sweating profusely. I can't talk to you right now was all she'd said before she hung up. I can't talk to you right now.
He burst into the lobby of the Dean's office, then stopped abruptly when the receptionist and the secretary looked up at him in unison from the eerie quiet of their desks.
"She left right after you called," the receptionist told him. She leaned back a bit, alarmed by his flushed face. "Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, great," he said and ran out.
Back in his car, back on the highway. It was at least twenty-five minutes to their house. And how did he even know she would be there? That might be the last place she'd want to be. But he couldn't think of where else she might have gone. He thought of Jamie. Maybe she'd gone to pick him up from school. No; being with the kids didn't have a calming effect on her as it did for him. Something about them, Jamie especially—his curly towhead, his new skin, his dewy smell, his laugh—they always had a way of making everything else fall away. But he knew it was different for her; she spent so much more time with them. She'd want to be alone.
By the time he turned onto their street he had no memory of driving there. He realized he was driving ridiculously fast when he passed a woman pushing a stroller and she hollered at him. He didn't actually slow down, though, until he reached the crest of the hill near their house and saw a car parallel parked on the street out front. He recognized it immediately as the same car that had waited for him outside the jail the first day he'd visited Jenny. He couldn't believe it.
He sagged against the headrest. He had the distinct sense of time passing at an uncontrollable rate and a feeling that the longer he sat there, the more irretrievable she became. He reached for his phone on the seat next to him. Even as he punched in the numbers, he knew it wasn't wise, that there was a good chance the reporter had a police scanner in his car and might pick up the conversation. But he couldn't think clear enough to see any other options.
The answering machine came on and he heard Michael's voice telling him to leave a message. He choked up at hearing it. The long beep sounded.
"Claire, babe, pick up. Please, pick up." Silence. He knew he had to keep talking or it would switch off. "Claire, please. Please." Maybe she wasn't in there. But where else could she be? "There's a reporter outside the house." Silence, still. "I want to come in and talk to you, but I need to know you're there. Okay?" Silence, again. "Okay? Claire, please pick up. You can hang up on me, but just pick up first." He thought about calling Marcia, across the street. Maybe she'd seen Claire come home. "Babe, please. Please. We need to talk." Inhale. "I love you."
He heard a crashing sound in his ear when she picked up; she must've dropped it.
"If you ever say those three words to me again, I swear I'll cut your tongue out." The venom in her voice wormed its way into his head. He was stunned. "Don't even try to come into this house. I've disconnected the garage opener and locked the garage. I know you have a key for the front, but I'm sure your reporter friend would love the opportunity to talk to you as you struggle to get in."
He stared at the steering wheel. Her voice had been calm when she'd hung up on him at the university, but still, he'd known it would be bad when he found her. He'd expected her to yell and scream and call him names and tell him what a fuck-up he was. He'd expected to have to explain what he'd done, to come up with some half-brained explanation for it, even though he had none. He'd thought she might even try to take her anger out on him physically. He almost would have preferred that; physical pain might blunt the emotional pain. He knew she would probably tell him to pack his bags and find somewhere else to sleep—that's what women did, wasn't it, when their husbands cheated on them? Yes, he had expected it to be bad, but not like this. Not so fast. He didn't think for a moment that in her cold calm she would lock him out of the house first thing.
"Don't hang up," he managed to croak.
"I'll give you one sentence. Don't waste it."
He resisted the urge to just starting talking. He recognized immediately that if he didn't say the right thing, he'd never get in. Ever. He knew this wasn't the time to try to justify or make excuses for what he'd done. He glanced at the reporter's car.
"There's a reporter sitting outside the house and we'd be much better equipped to deal with him if we act as a team and it's very important that we do this before Michael gets off the bus and he accosts him and I promise you he will because they have no scruples." Then he let out a deep breath; for fear she would cut him off, he'd said it all in one long desperate go.
"Yeah, and you're swimming in them, aren't you?"
He waited. He didn't say anything because he knew it was just an editorial and not her real response. He had appealed to her mother-bear instincts, putting his money on his belief that her desire to protect the kids would prevail over her anger at him, and he was praying that he'd bet right.
"Fine. If you can get around to the deck without him seeing you, I'll let you in. But I don't want him to know you're here."
"Okay, I'll—"
She hung up without letting him finish.
Trembling with relief, he drove out of the circle and onto another street that came within several hundred feet of the side of their house. From there, it was merely a matter of cutting through a few yards and some woods to approach the house from the back. He killed the engine, stepped out of the car, and quietly closed the door. The cold air hit his sweat-drenched body; he shivered and pulled his coat tighter.
He saw her as soon as he reached the deck. She stood inside the house, just on the other side of the sliding door, and stared at him. Faint red blotches marked her face, and the swollen rims of her bloodshot eyes were angry with tears. Strands of hair on each side of her face stuck to her wet cheeks. Her ethereal innocence, her invisible light that had served as both his beacon and his compass, had vanished. She was not the same
woman he'd kissed that morning before he'd left for work. She was the most beautiful and tainted thing he'd ever seen.
He tried to pull the door open but found it locked. His eyes began to well up, and when she saw this, she banged repeatedly on the glass with her fists.
"Don't you dare! Don't you dare cry. You have no right to cry!" Her screams seeped through the glass, slightly muffled but clearly audible.
He pulled on the door with one hand and struggled to wipe his eyes with the other.
"Let me in, Claire. You can hit me, but just let me in." He feared she would break the glass, and then they'd have an emergency room visit on top of everything else.
She unlocked the door and pulled it open. He started to approach her but she was on him in an instant, hitting his chest and pushing him backward, farther out into the middle of the deck. Not one long push but a series of pushes that were really open-palmed strikes.
"I hate you! I hate you!" she said with each contact. Tears flooded her cheeks. "I hate you!" she repeated over and over, and he began to wonder if she really was speaking or if it was merely the echo of her voice playing in his head. "Don't you cry! You have no right to cry!" He tried to hold back his tears because he wanted to do whatever she wanted him to do.
He grasped her wrists and held her arms in midair. "Stop it."
She twisted to free her arms but succeeded only with the right one. She promptly began hitting him again with it. "Let me go! Don't touch me!" Her voice and her energy began to wane. He now had a firm grip on her left arm. "You . . . have . . . no . . . right . . . to . . . touch . . . me!" She said it slowly, methodically, and with each word she punched him, but the punches were less forceful, as if she was finally surrendering to the reality of his treason.
"What have you done?" she sobbed, and he guided her unaware back into the house. She jerked her left arm and he let it go. She backed herself to the kitchen table and collapsed on a chair.
"I've done something terrible, but it's not what you're thinking," he said. He stayed by the door. "It wasn't an ongoing thing."
She covered her ears. "No, no, I don't want to hear this. Don't you dare try to minimize what you did, what you've done to us." She inhaled, the short, quick breaths of one who's been crying hard. "You've destroyed us."
The last words hit him hard. "I'm not trying to minimize it. I just thought you should know. It was just one time."
She must have refueled because she came at him again. In one quick motion she was on her feet in front of him, pushing, striking at him with her open hands. She pressed him against the slider and he had nowhere to go.
"Tell me, Jack! Why should I know that? Huh? Tell me why! What's the difference?" She tried to catch her breath. "You're a fucking cliché, you know that? What are you going to say next? It didn't mean anything? Well, fuck you! It meant everything." He tried to block the punches—she'd progressed once more to fists—but his heart wasn't in it because he knew that she was entitled to every one of them and more. "One time, huh? Too bad for you, Jack. You've should've fucked her brains out a million times to make it really worth it. Because you've destroyed us. I hope your one time was worth that."
He closed his eyes and just let her do it—let her hit and punch and flail at him until she'd drained her reserves again. When she finished, he listened to her cross the room and climb the stairs, and then he slid his back down the glass and sat with his head between his knees for a long time. He'd never known such pain.
Later, he heard her footsteps and looked up to see her coming down the stairs with a small satchel in her hand. He panicked. Somehow, the thought that she might be the one to leave hadn't occurred to him.
"I've packed a change of clothes for the kids." Her voice was flat. "I want you to meet Michael at the bus stop; don't let him come to the house. Then pick up Jamie at Christopher's; he's supposed to play there after school. The directions are in the side pocket of the bag. Where you go with them after that is up to you. Just don't come back here tonight. You can drop them off tomorrow." She set the bag on the table and turned to go back up the stairs.
"Claire, you can't barricade yourself in here."
"Once the story breaks, he'll leave." She spoke with her back to him. "Anyway, they already got my 'no comment' at the university. It's you he's waiting for." Her voice, though steeped in sarcasm, wavered, and he thought she was about to cry again.
"What do you want me to tell them?"
She turned. Her usually bright eyes were darker than he'd ever seen them. They both knew he was talking about the kids, not the reporters.
"I think I'll leave that up to you. How 'bout that, Jack?"
When he finally went upstairs to rinse his face and pack a change of clothes for himself, he found her sprawled face down across the bed. He stood in the doorway of the bathroom, trying to send her a telepathic message to turn her head, to look at him just once. Except for the sporadic rise of her back when she sniffled, she lay motionless. He knew she was awake.
He went into the bathroom to compose himself. After splashing his face and drying it, he looked in the mirror and was frightened by what he saw. His eyes were bloodshot, and his fair skin lacked even a hint of color. But it was more than physical. He'd lost something inside.
With his toothbrush in hand, he crossed the room to his closet and grabbed a pair of jeans, a shirt, socks and underwear. He shoved it all into a small overnight bag that he found on the floor behind yesterday's dirty laundry. He looked at her again. He had to say something.
"Claire?"
She didn't respond, didn't even flinch at the sound of his voice.
"Claire? Can we talk?"
Her silence scared him more than her outbursts downstairs. He sat down on an old wicker chair. The room was quiet enough for him to hear the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the front hall downstairs.
When she finally spoke, her voice dripped sarcasm and was raspy from prolonged crying. "Yeah, sure, what do you want to talk about? How was the weather when you drove home?"
"Claire—"
"I have just one question for you." She sat up and faced him. Seeing the hollowness in her eyes again filled him with an insatiable longing for her, a longing to hold her until she had no choice but to forgive him. "I want to know how it happened. I mean, did you plan it? Or, you know, did circumstances throw you together, and then you simply couldn't resist? How did it happen?"
It was as if she'd asked so that she could weigh the evidence to determine whether he should be charged with manslaughter or murder. Were his actions heat-of-the-moment, or premeditated? Jack understood that her ability to forgive him was perhaps dependent on the answer.
"I didn't plan it, not like you're thinking, but . . . it wasn't an accident, either."
She turned to the window with a grunt. "What's that supposed to mean?"
What did it mean? He hadn't planned it, at least he didn't believe he had. He thought back to what Jenny had said about everything being so calculated. He'd never felt that way and still didn't. He'd thought about it a lot, that was true, but until that moment in the garage, when words he hadn't planned to speak fell from his mouth, it had never been anything but fantasy. It was as if he'd snapped, as if he'd temporarily lost the use of his brain and his common sense had taken a leave of absence. In Jenny's presence he'd lost all ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior.
That was it. It was like temporary insanity. That wonderful defense he'd always scoffed at.
"I don't know," he said finally. There was no way now to explain his thoughts.
After another two chimes on the clock, she said, "I want you to leave."
His heart beat furiously. He'd expected more questions, a real discussion of what he'd done, but now he realized that he'd messed up again by not giving her a satisfactory answer to what she claimed was her only question. "Don't you want to—"
"I mean leave. Not just leave right now. But leave. I can't share the same space with you." The sharpnes
s in her voice had dulled. Now she just sounded weary.
"Claire, come on, don't do that. We need to talk." She'd never even asked him why. He wanted the chance to try to explain himself.
"I can't have you here. It hurts too much."
"But the kids will—"
"You can come over when you want to see the kids. I won't keep you from them."
She pushed herself off the bed and trudged to the bathroom. Her face revealed no emotion; he preferred the anger. At least then he knew he still provoked feeling in her. His greatest fear was that she would stop feeling anything for him.
"I don't want to just 'see' my kids. I want to live with them."
She grabbed the molding on the doorway, and for a moment he thought she was going to faint right there. "I guess you should have thought about that before you decided to screw her, huh, Jack?" She spoke with her back to him. "See, I've always believed building a life with your wife and kids to be mutually exclusive from screwing another woman. The two just don't mix. I always thought you believed that, too. Silly me."
She closed the bathroom door. Within a few minutes he heard the shower running. He walked to the door and let his weight fall against it. It was as close as he could get to her. He listened as she slid the shower door open and then closed. He tried the doorknob, but she had locked it. He took a few steps to her side of the bed and picked up her pillow. He buried his face in it. The scents were subtle, mixed, but there. The clean smell of her skin after bathing, the faintly citrus fragrance of her cologne, the balmy scent of her sweat after they made love.
He heard her crying. Her sobs were contained at first, but he could detect them nevertheless over the pattering of the shower. He lowered the pillow as the muscles in his chest tightened and he imagined that having a heart attack must feel like this. When her cries metamorphosed from uncontrollable sobs into intentional wails, as if she was trying by sheer will to force the pain from her body, he went back to the door and placed his palm on it. He tried to absorb it all—all of the hurt that poured from her body with each exhalation. He could never tell her so, but he felt it, too: the grip on the lungs that made it hard to breathe, the excruciating hole in the heart where the blood and emotion tried to escape. Except he knew that her pain seared from anger, while his burned from shame. And that made all the difference in the world.
Tell No Lies Page 30